‘The Underground Storyteller’ deleted scene

Posted on March 1, 2015

Did I always want to be famous on the internet? When I was a kid, the internet was teletext. I have absolutely no idea how to explain Teletext to people who never experienced it, but I will try; you would switch your TV to a certain channel, press a button with wiggly lines on the remote, and the screen would fill with this awful gaudy neon writing updating you on whatever you wanted – games, travel, sport, current affairs – while the audio of the programme you were watching would play on in the background. There were about a hundred pages to Teletext and if you wanted to turn to the next one, you had to wait for it to scroll through every single one of them before it would let you proceed. So no, when I saw that, I didn’t look at it and think, “One day, I’m gonna be famous on that.”

That was an extract that I cut out of the District Line but thought I’d share with you :) Much of my opinions on fame and the internet were covered in the book without this, particularly in my theatre analogy in the Waterloo & City line chapter – I’d been carrying that analogy around with me for years. I even wrote it up as a Tumblr post once and sent it to a bunch of YouTube friends to ask for their opinions; Tomska said I should post it, John Green said I shouldn’t. I’m glad it finally found its home in my book.

I’ve started writing a new book provisionally titled ‘Food For Thought’ which is about the nature of human consumption in all its forms – in the meantime, The Underground Storyteller is still available on my site and you can read the first chapter free (or share it with friends) by clicking here!

I’m also releasing a new single this month – I’ll be writing you soon to tell you all about it.